Measuring Ourselves in Love

May 20, 2007

When I was younger, I was pretty confident that I knew what love meant. After all, we all experience love in some way, being in love, loving someone, being loved by someone. Virtually everyone has known the love of somebody, a friend, a family member, an acquaintance.

But the older I get the more I wonder sometimes whether I, or most anyone else, has much sense of what that over-used word, love, really means? When we are honest, we sense our own distance from its full meaning. Why?

Because, the older we get, the more we also begin to know love’s dark side. Too common are these experiences: We fall in love and think it will last forever, but then fall out of love, feel love go sour, feel love grow cold, see love betrayed, feel ourselves wounded by love, and wound others. Finally, even more upsetting, we all find that there are always people in our lives who are cold, bitter, and unforgiving towards us so that it is not always easy to feel love and be loving.

In the light of this reticence, I would like comment on Jesus’ most important commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you!”

We too easily read that simplistically, romantically, and in a one-sided, over-confident manner. But this command contains the most important challenge of the whole gospel and, like the deepest part of the gospel to which it is linked, the crucifixion, it is very, very difficult to imitate. Why?

It’s easy to consider ourselves as loving if we only look at one side of things, namely, how we relate to those people who are loving, warm, respectful, and gracious towards us. If we rate ourselves on how we feel about ourselves in our best moments among like-minded friends, we can easily conclude both that we are loving persons and that we are measuring up to Jesus’ command to love as he did.

But if we begin to look at the skeletons in our relational closets our naive confidence soon disappears: What about the people who hate us, whom we don’t like? What about the people whom we avoid and who avoid us? What about those people towards whom we feel resentment? What about all those people with whom we are at odds, towards whom we feel suspicion, coldness, anger? What about those people whom we haven’t been able to forgive?

It’s one thing to love someone who adores you, it’s quite another to love someone who wants you dead!

But that’s the real test. Jesus’ command to love contains a critical subordinate clause, “as I have loved you!” What was unique in the way he loved us?

Where Jesus stretches us beyond our natural instincts and beyond all self-delusion is in his command to love our enemies, to be warm to those who are cold to us, to be kind to those who are cruel to us, to do good to those who hate us, to forgive those who hurt us, to forgive those who won’t forgive us, and to ultimately love and forgive those who are trying to kill us.

That command, love and forgive your enemies, more than any creedal formula or other moral issue, is the litmus-test for Christian discipleship. We can ardently believe in and defend every item in the creed and fight passionately for justice in all its dimensions, but the real test of whether or not we are followers of Jesus is the capacity or non-capacity to forgive an enemy, to remain warm and loving towards someone who is not warm and loving to us.

We shouldn’t delude ourselves on this. It is easy to rationalize this away and, if we do, no doubt there will be more than enough false friends around who will furnish us with both theological and psychological arguments that will justify us in not loving our enemies. But the gospel is uncompromising: We are loving or non-loving not on the basis of how we respond to those who love us, but on the basis of how we respond to those who hate us, and are cold, hostile, and murderous toward us. That’s the hard, non-negotiable truth underlying Jesus’ command to love and, when we are honest, we have to admit that we are still a long ways from measuring up to that.

There’s a sobering challenge in an old Stevie Nicks’ song, Golddust Woman: She suggests that it’s good that, at a point in life, someone “shatters our illusion of love” because far too often, blind to its own true intentions, our love is manipulative and self-serving. Too often, the song points out, we are lousy lovers who unconsciously pick our prey.

What shatters our illusion of love is the presence in our lives of people who hate us. They’re the test. It’s here where we have to measure up: If we can love them, we’re real lovers, if we can’t, we’re still under a self-serving illusion.

Painful Goodbyes and the Ascension

May 13, 2007

Among the deeper mysteries in life perhaps the one we struggle with the most is the mystery of the Ascension. It’s not so much that we misunderstand it, we simply don’t understand it.

What is the Ascension?

Historically it was an event within the life of Jesus and the early church and is now a feast-day for Christians, one that links Easter to Pentecost. But it is more than an historical event, it is at the same time a theology, a spirituality, and an insight into life that we need to understand to better sort out the paradoxical interplay between life and death, presence and absence, love and loss.

The Ascension names and highlights a paradox that lies deep at the center of life, namely, that we all reach a point in life where we can only give our presence more deeply by going away so that others can receive the full blessing of our spirits.

What does that mean?

When Jesus was preparing to leave this earth he kept repeating the words: “It is better for you that I go away! You will be sad now, but your sadness will turn to joy. If I don’t go away you will be unable to receive my spirit. Don’t cling to me, I must ascend.”

Why is it better sometimes that we go away?

Any parent with grown children has heard similar words from their children, unspoken perhaps but there nonetheless. When young people leave home to go to college or to begin life on their own, what they are really saying to their parents is: “Mum and dad, it is better that I go away. You will be sad now, but your sadness will turn to joy. If I don’t go, I will always be your little boy or little girl but I will be unable to give you my life as an adult. So please don’t cling to the child you once had or you will never be able to receive my adulthood. I need to go away now so that our love can come to full bloom.”

The pain in this kind of letting go is often excruciating, as parents know, but to refuse to do that is to truncate life.

The same is true for the mystery of death. For example: I was 22 years old when in the space of four months both of my parents, still young, died. For my siblings and me the pain was searing. Initially we were nearly overwhelmed with a sense of being orphaned, abandoned, of losing a vital life-connection (that, ironically, we had mostly taken for granted until then). And our feelings were mainly cold, there’s little that’s warm in death.

But time is a great healer. After a while, and for me this took several years, the coldness disappeared and my parents’ deaths were no longer a painful thing. I felt again their presence, and now as a warm, nurturing spirit that was with me all time. The coldness of death turned into a warmth. They had gone away but now they could give me their love and blessing in a way that they never could fully while they were alive. Their going away eventually created a deeper and purer presence.

The mystery of love and intimacy contains that paradox: To remain present to someone we love we have to sometimes be absent, in ways big and small. In the paradox of love, we can only fully bless each other when we go away. That is why most of us only “get” the blessing our loved ones were for us after they die. Mystically, “blood and water” (cleansing and the deep permission to live without guilt) flow from their dead bodies, just as these flowed from Jesus’ dead body.

And this is even true, perhaps particularly so, in cases where our loved ones were difficult characters who struggled for peace or to bless anyone in this life. Death washes clean and releases the spirit and, even in the case of people who struggled to love, we can after their deaths receive their blessing in way we never could while they were alive. Like Jesus, they could only give us their real presence by going away.

“It is better for you that I go away!” These are painful words most of the time, from a young child leaving her mother for a day to go to school, to the man leaving his family for a week to go on a business trip, to the young man moving out of his family’s house to begin life on his own, to a loved one saying goodbye in death. Separation hurts, goodbyes bring painful tears, and death of every kind wrenches the heart.

But that is part of the mystery of love. Eventually we all reach a point where what is best for everyone is that we go away so that we can give our spirit. The gift that our lives are can only be fully received after we ascend.

Moral Loneliness

May 6, 2007

Robert Coles, in describing Simone Weil, once suggested that what she really suffered from and what motivated her life was her moral loneliness.

What is that?

Moral loneliness is what we experience when we ache for a soul mate. We are lonely in different ways: We always feel some distance from others, always feel some restlessness that cannot be alleviated even within our deepest experiences of intimacy, and always feel an inchoate nostalgia for a home we can never quite find. There is loneliness, a restlessness, an aching, a yearning, a longing, an appetite, a disquiet, a nostalgia, a timelessness, and a sexual inconsummation inside of us that never quite gives us easy rest. We are, in the words of Toni Morrison, soul-chained to deep things outside of ourselves.

Moreover, this dis-ease lies at the center of our experience, not at its edges. We are not restful persons who sometimes get restless, serene persons who sometimes experience disquiet, or fulfilled persons who once in a while get frustrated. Rather we are restless beings who occasionally find rest, disquieted persons who sometimes find solitude and serenity, and dissatisfied men and women who at times find satisfaction.

And, among all these multifarious yearnings, one is deeper than all the others: What we really long for, beneath everything else, is a moral partner, someone to meet us in the depth of our souls, someone from whom we don’t have to hide what’s truest inside of us, and someone who understands and spontaneously honours all that is most precious to us. Someone like that would be a true soul-partner and more than we long someone to sleep with sexually, we long for someone to sleep with in this way, morally. What does this mean?

Scripture and the mystics, unafraid of earthy and sexual images, express it best. What we ultimately long for is soul-consummation. Here is an image from the Song of Songs (3, 1-4)

On my bed at night I sought my beloved:

I sought but could not find him!

So I got up and went through the city;

in the streets and on the squares, seeking my beloved.

I sought but could not find him!

I came upon the watchmen-on their rounds in the city:

“Have you seen my beloved?”

Barely had I passed them when I found my beloved.

I caught him and would not let him go,

until I had brought him to

my mother’s house,

to the room where my mother had conceived me!

It is hard to come up with an image that is more intimate than this one: What we most long for is to take someone home, to our mother’s room, to the most intimate of all places, to the very bed on which we were conceived. But that is a place in the heart, the ache of moral loneliness.

What exactly is being said here?

Each of us, beyond what we can name, has a dark memory of once having been touched and caressed by hands far gentler than our own. That caress has left a permanent mark, an imprint of a love so tender, good, and pure that its memory is a prism through which we see everything else. The old myths express it best when they tell that, before we were born, God kissed our souls and we go through life always remembering, in some dark way, that kiss and measuring everything else in relation to it and its original purity, tenderness, and sweetness.

This unconscious memory of once having been touched and caressed by God creates the deepest place inside of us, the place where we hold all that is most precious and sacred to us. When we say that something “rings true”, what we are really saying is that it honours that deep place in our hearts, that it coincides with a deep truth, tenderness, and purity that we have already experienced.

From this place all that is deepest and truest within us issues forth – our own caresses, kisses, and tears. Paradoxically this then becomes the place that we most guard from others, even as it is the place that we would most like someone to come into, providing that entry respects precisely the purity, tenderness, and truth of the original caress of God that formed that tender cavity in the first place.

This is the place of deepest intimacy and the place of deepest loneliness, the place where we are innocent and the place where we are violated, the place where we are holy, temples of God, sacred churches of reverence, and the place that we corrupt when we willfully lie. This is our moral center and the aching we feel there is rightly called moral loneliness. It is here that we long for a soul mate.

And it is in this longing that we experience what is deepest inside of us, namely, an unyielding ache that drives us out of ourselves where, like the author of the Song of Songs, we desperately search for someone to sleep with morally.

God’s Voice as Invitation

April 29, 2007

Where does God speak in our world? How does God speak?

Whenever you hear a voice that sounds coercive, threatening, overbearing, that is somehow loud and in your face, you can be sure that, no matter how religious and holy it might claim to be, it is not God’s voice. God’s voice in this world is never coercive or overbearing in any way, but is always an invitation and a beckoning that respects you and your freedom in a way that no human institution or person ever does. God’s voice is thoroughly underwhelming, like a baby’s presence.

Sadly whenever someone tries to teach this, immediately there are objections, often angry and bitter: What about God’s judgment? What about God’s condemnation of sin? What about God’s anger?

Scripture does, on the surface, give us the impression that God is sometimes angry and full of condemnation and violence. But these are anthropomorphisms (a way of speaking about God that reveals how we feel about God when we are unfaithful, sinful, and violent).

God’s voice does judge and it does condemn, but it judges and condemns not by coercive force, but in the same way that the innocence of a baby judges false sophistication, in the way that generosity exposes selfishness, in the way that big-heartedness reveals pettiness, in the way that light makes darkness flee, and in the way that the truth shames lies. God’s voice judges us not by overpowering us but by shining love and light into all those places were we find ourselves huddled in fear, shame, bitterness, hostility, and sin.

But this is not something we learn easily. Already way back, before the birth of Christ, sincere religious people were yearning for God to come into the world in power. What they wanted, and prayed for, was a physical superstar who would come into the world and cleanse it by overpowering sin and evil and rooting them out by force. What they wanted in the longed-for Messiah was a morally superior violence that would give evil no options, but force it literally to acquiesce. What we got instead was a helpless baby in the straw who overpowered no one.

Twenty centuries later, we are still struggling to accept this. Too often the Christ we try to incarnate and preach is still that ancient, longed-for, overpowering Messiah who aims to cleanse the world through flat-out coercion.

We see this most clearly of course in Islamic extremists who like well-intentioned Christians back in the time of the Inquisition, sincerely believe that error has no rights and that, in the name of God, we must use force, violence if necessary, to bring about God’s will on earth. In this view, murder and violence may be done to further God’s purpose because God wants his will imposed upon this world, whether the world wants to accept it or not. But this is the antithesis of true religion.

We need to view God, always, as non-coercive, as an invitation. This has immense implications for everything to do with church and religion, from how we preach, to how we catechize, to how we do liturgy, to how we reach out to those who don’t share our beliefs, to how we approach divisive moral issues, to how loud we turn up the sound system in our churches. God’s voice is not a loud, coercive, overbearing, threatening voice, one that gets into your face whether you like it or not. Rather, God’s voice invites in, beckons, leaves you free, and is as non-threatening as the innocence and powerlessness of a baby – or a saint.

We would do well to better understand this. We are, I believe, too prone inside our church circles to blame the world’s resistance to God’s message simply on its hardness of heart, sin, and indifference. Partly that’s true, but a large part of that resistance has its root too in another source, namely, our own preaching, catechesis, pastoral practice, moral fever, and elitism. Too often, however sincerely we might be doing this, the voice we try to give to God is too-laden with coercion, threat, manipulation, violence, harshness, our own judgments, our own fears, our own wounds, and especially our own egos to bear enough resemblance to the divine kenosis and free invitation that Jesus gave voice to in his birth, life, and message.

Sometimes, after just having given a talk or a homily, I am told by a well-meaning person: “You should raise your voice more! Speak louder! You’re speaking too softly!”

I don’t think so! We need, I believe, to (figuratively and perhaps literally) begin more and more to lower our voices whenever we purport to be speaking in God’s name because God’s voice never overpowers, is never overbearing, never shouts at anyone. Indeed, as Mary Jo Leddy (a voice that speaks God’s hard challenge with the correct invitational gentleness) says: We need to find the few words that are truly our own – and then speak them, clearly but softly.

Commandments for Daily Life

April 22, 2007

Almost thirty years ago, Daniel Berrigan wrote a little book that he entitled, Ten Commandments for the Long Haul. It was, in effect, a handbook of sorts on how to be a prophet in today’s world. It was Berrigan at his best, explaining how a prophet must make a vow of love and not of alienation. Anyone who is trying to be prophetic, from the right or from the left, might profitably read this book.

He ends with a number of Commandments, not ten but forty-seven of them. Here’s a sample of them (paraphrased), just to give you a taste of his insight, language, and wit:

1) Call on Jesus when all else fails. Call on Him when all else succeeds (except that never happens).
2) Don’t be afraid to be afraid or appalled to be appalled. How do you think the trees feel these days, or the whales, or, for that matter, most humans?
3) Keep your soul to yourself. Soul is a possession worth paying for, they’re growing rarer. Learn from monks, they have secrets worth knowing.
4) About practically everything in the world, there’s nothing you can do. This is Socratic wisdom. However, about of few things you can do something. Do it, with a good heart.
5) On a long drive, there’s bound to be a dull stretch or two. Don’t go anywhere with someone who expects you to be interesting all the time. And don’t be hard on your fellow travelers. Try to smile after a coffee stop.
6) Practically no one has the stomach to love you, if you don’t love yourself. They just endure. So do you.
7) About healing: The gospels tell us that this was Jesus’ specialty and he was heard to say: “Take up your couch and walk!”
8) When traveling on an airplane, watch the movie, but don’t use the earphones. Then you’ll be able to see what’s going on, but not understand what’s happening, and so you’ll feel right at home, little different then you do on the ground.
9) Know that sometimes the only writing material you have is your own blood.
10) Start with the impossible. Proceed calmly towards the improbable. No worry, there are at least five exits.

Alongside these commandments, I’d like to share a Decalogue for Daily Living that Pope John XXIII wrote for himself, his own Commandments for daily life. They reflect his depth, his simplicity, and his humility:

1) “Only for today, I will seek to live the livelong day positively without wishing to solve the problems of my life all at once.
2) Only for today, I will take the greatest care of my appearance: I will dress modestly; I will not raise my voice; I will be courteous in my behaviour; I will not criticize anyone; I will not claim to improve or to discipline anyone except myself.
3) Only for today, I will be happy in the certainty that I was created to be happy, not only in the other world buy also in this one.
4) Only for today, I will adapt to circumstances, without requiring all circumstances to be adapted to my own wishes.
5) Only for today, I will devote 10 minutes of my time to some good reading, remembering that just as food is necessary to the life of the body, so good reading is necessary to the life of the soul.
6) Only for today, I will do one good deed and not tell anyone about it.
7) Only for today, I will do at least one thing I do not like doing; and if my feelings are hurt, I will make sure that no one notices.
8) Only for today, I will make a plan for myself: I may not follow it to the letter, but I will make it. And I will be on guard against two evils: hastiness and indecision.
9) Only for today, I will firmly believe, despite appearances, that the good Providence of God cares for me as no one else who exists in this world
10) Only for today, I will have no fears. In particular, I will not be afraid to enjoy what is beautiful and to believe in goodness. Indeed, for 12 hours, I can certainly do what might cause me consternation were I to believe I had to do it all my life.”

Einstein on God and Religion

April 15, 2007

A recent issue of TIME magazine carried a series of excerpts from the diaries of Albert Einstein that give us an insight into how he felt about God and religion. There is a lot of disagreement as to whether he was an atheist or a believer. These excerpts let him speak for himself.

What exactly did he believe about God and religion? Here are some of his comments:

Asked at a dinner party as to whether he was religious, he replied: “Yes, you can call it that. Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.”

He was Jewish, but his parents were agnostic about Judaism and sent him to a Catholic school as a boy. There he studied both the Catholic catechism and the Jewish scriptures with some enthusiasm. Asked to what extent Christianity influenced his life, he answered: “As a child I received religious instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarean … No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”

Asked whether or not he believed in God: “I am not an atheist. I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being towards God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws.”

At one point, he composed a personal creed. Here’s one of its tenets: “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder or stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly : this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.”

As well, he was always harder on atheists than on believers in his criticisms: “What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility towards the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.” Doctrinaire atheists, he suggested, are unconsciously and unhealthily reacting to their past: “Fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after a hard struggle. They are creatures who – in their grudge against traditional religion as ‘the opium of the masses’ – cannot hear the music of the spheres.”

But, despite these insights,, his faith was not traditional. He doubted that God was personal and he didn’t believe in personal immortality.

So where does he really land in terms of God and religion?

He didn’t get some things right, but then who does? As Christians we believe that the first thing we need to affirm is that God is ineffable. God escapes our thought.. That means that, while we can know God, we can’t imagine God, can’t conceptualize God, and can’t speak with any accuracy about God. God is infinite being and that, by definition, is beyond the categories of our thought and imagination. Trying to imagine God is like trying to imagine the highest number possible, an impossibility because numbers have no limit, you can always count one more.

That God cannot be imagined with any accuracy is, in fact, a Christian dogma. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) taught dogmatically that any words we use about God are more inaccurate than accurate, suggesting that Einstein’s “feeling of utter humility towards the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos” is perhaps closer to the truth of faith than is the concept of God of his critics.

Personally, I find his insights healthy and refreshing – and a valuable apologetic for belief in God. When the person who is perhaps the greatest scientific mind in history tells us that there is an unimaginable, benign, awe-inspiring, ordering presence beyond us that is undergirding everything and that we should live in wonder and humility in the face of that, then the arguments of lesser minds that faith is naive and superstitious become considerably less compelling.

The Resurrection – The Power of Positive Thinking or the Power of God?

April 8, 2007

Classical writers in all religious traditions tell us that there is a secret to growth, namely, when we reach a certain point, we must let grace do the work. It isn’t that we cease making an effort; it’s just that we need to let our efforts be augmented by something beyond us.

Etty Hillesum, in her diaries, explains this: “I don’t have to tinker with my life [anymore] for an organic process is at work. Something is growing, and every time I look inside, something fresh has happened, and all I have to do is to accept it.”

Is this what we call “the resurrection”?

For many people the resurrection is a metaphor, the faith equivalent of the Phoenix-myth: Deaths aren’t final and we can, if we do it right, rise from our own ashes.

What gives us the power to rise from our own ashes? In this view, proper will-power and positive thinking. The idea is that if you think positively, good things will happen to you. If you believe strongly enough in something, it will happen. If you preserve long enough in hope the good thing wished for will be given you. Faith, hope, and positive thinking make good things happen and resurrect life from its many deaths.

This is the basis for many self-help philosophies and a lot of religious groups. They base themselves more on the power of the human spirit than on the power of transcendent grace. For them, the resurrection is the Phoenix-myth, upgraded a bit by psychological and religious language.

And there is some depth and truth in this. Among other things, the resurrection is about positive thinking and the belief that positive energy makes good things happen, just as self-defeating thoughts are also self-fulfilling. Positive thinking creates positive energy and that energy can help bring life out of ashes. This is true even physically. Sometimes in a serious illness the right attitude is just as important for a cure as the right medication. This is not just wishful thinking; proper attitude lets the right physical, emotional, and spiritual energy flow into the world and into the body.

For many people, this is what the resurrection means, it is a metaphor for the transformation that positive energy can bring into this world..

But it is more than that. The resurrection is not just about the potential effect of positive human energy within us, it is too, and especially, about the power of God, miraculous energy, energy that can do for us what we can’t do for ourselves, energy that can do for us what nature, all on its own, can’t, The resurrection is about power entering our world and our lives from beyond.
How might we understand that?

Paul Tillich once made a distinction between what he termed: Pseudo-religion, Quasi-religion, and Real-religion.

Pseudo-religion is when we use the language of religion (God, revelation, grace, resurrection) but in essence, use those words to refer to what is highest inside of our individual consciousness. And that, at its best, can take us to human maturity and altruism, just as at its worst it can take us to narcissism and grandiosity. In either case, in the end, we are recycling human consciousness, and will-power and positive thinking play the pivotal role in any growth and transformation.

Quasi-religion, on the other hand, does not use the language of religion but uses instead the language of social analysis, psychology, philosophy, economics, and anthropology. And what it calls us to is to what’s highest, not in individual consciousness, but inside of the collective consciousness. Like Real-religion, it calls us beyond ourselves to the transpersonal. Quasi-religion, in its best expressions inside of some political and social ideologies (Marxism, Green Peace, NGOs, Social Justice ideologies), like Real-religion, calls us beyond ourselves, but, unlike Real-religion, it doesn’t ultimately bring transcendent air into our lives. It still only touches what is highest inside of us and our own will-power and positive thinking remain the real driving force behind any transformation either in the world or inside of ourselves.

Real-religion might use or not use the classical words of religion, but, in either case, what it opens up for us is not just what’s highest inside of ourselves and what we can achieve through will-power and positive thinking. Rather it opens us to a power and grace beyond us. It doesn’t simply recycle the air inside of our universe; it brings in air from beyond, divine, transcendent air.

The resurrection has a place for positive thinking and emphasizes the importance of appropriate will-power. But it’s much more than that. Ultimately, it is about the transcendent power of God breaking into nature and into our lives and doing for us what we can’t do simply through will-power and positive thinking. It is a power that can re-arrange the very atoms inside of our physical bodies, our aching emotions, and our divided world and raise up new life from the ashes.

The Cross of Jesus

April 1, 2007

Among all the religious symbols in the world none is more universal than the cross. You see crosses everywhere, on walls, on hillsides, in churches, in houses, in bedrooms, on chains around peoples’ necks, on rings, on ear-rings, on old people, on young people, on believers, and on people who aren’t sure in what they believe. Not everyone can explain what the cross means or why they choose to wear one, but most everyone has an inchoate sense that it is a symbol, perhaps the ultimate symbol, for depth, love, fidelity, and faith.

And the cross is exactly that, the ultimate symbol of depth, love, fidelity, and faith. Rene Girard, an anthropologist, once commented that “the cross of Jesus is the single most revolutionary moral event in all of history.” The world measures time by it. We are in the year 2007 (roughly) since Jesus died on a cross and ever-increasing numbers of people began to organize their lives around its significance.

What is so morally revolutionary in the cross?

Precisely because it such a deep mystery, the cross is not easy to grasp intellectually. The deeper things in life, love, fidelity, morality, and faith are not mathematics, but mysteries whose unfathomable depths always leave room for more still to be understood. We never quite arrive at an adequate understanding of them.

But that doesn’t mean that we don’t know them. Knowing is different than understanding and we intuit a lot more than we can intellectually imagine or express.

For example, TIME magazine did a cover story some years ago on the meaning of the cross and interviewed a large number of people asking what the cross of Jesus meant to them. One woman admitted that she couldn’t really explain what the cross of Jesus meant to her, but stated that she had a sense of its meaning: When she was young girl, her mother was murdered by a jealous boyfriend. When she saw the blood-soaked mattress and her mother’s bloody hand-print on the wall, she realized that she had to find a connection between her mother’s story (and her blood on that mattress) and Jesus’ story (and his blood on the cross.) Sometimes the heart intuits where the head needs to go.

Beyond this gut-knowledge, what can we intellectually grasp about the meaning of the cross? What is its revolutionary moral character?

Theologians, classically, have tried to come to grips with this mystery by dividing the meaning of the cross (and of Jesus’ death) into two parts: First, the cross gives us our deepest understanding of the nature of God. Second, the cross is redemptive, it saves us. All Christians believe that somehow we are washed clean in the blood of Jesus, the Lamb of God.

Neither of these concepts is easy to explain, though theologians do better with the first, the cross as revelation, than with the second, the cross as redemptive. But both concepts, even to the limited extent that we can intellectually understand them, are thoroughly morally revolutionary.

Christianity is 2000 years old, but it took us nearly 1900 years to fully grasp the fact that slavery is wrong, that it goes against heart of Jesus’ teaching. The same can be said about the equality of women. Much of what Jesus revealed to us is like a time-released medicine capsule. Throughout the centuries, slowly, gradually, incrementally, Jesus’ message is dissolving more deeply into our consciousness.

And this is particularly true about our understanding of the cross and what it teaches. For example: There have been popes for 2000 years, beginning with Peter, but it was only the last Pope, John Paul II, in our own generation, who stood up and said with clarity that capital punishment is wrong (independent of any arguments about whether or not it is a deterrent, brings closure to the victims’ families or not, or can be argued in terms of justice) Capital punishment is wrong because it goes against the heart of the gospel as revealed in the cross, namely, that we should forgive murderers, not kill them.

That is just one of the morally revolutionary features inside of the cross. There are countless more. Rene Girard, speaking as an anthropologist, puts it one way when he says that the cross is the most revolutionary moral event in the history of the planet. Mark, the Evangelist, speaking as a disciple of Jesus, puts it another way: For him, the cross of Jesus is the deep secret to everything.

In Mark’s gospel, to the extent that we understand the cross of Jesus, we grasp life’s deepest secret. And the reverse is just as true: To the extent that we don’t grasp the meaning of the cross, we miss the key that opens up life’s deepest secrets. When we don’t grasp the cross, life deep mysteries become a riddle.

Both Mark and Rene Girard are right: The cross of Jesus contains life’s deepest moral secret, but, as Rumi says, we live with a secret we sometimes know, and then not.

Overcoming Hypersensitivity

March 25, 2007

In her autobiography, Therese of Lisieux describes what she considers as one of the key moments of conversion in her life:

She was the youngest in her family and her father’s favorite. He doted on her and every year when the family came home from church on Christmas Eve, he had a little ritual he played out as he gave a gift to her, his youngest and favorite daughter.

One Christmas Eve when Therese was nine years old and still tender and sad from her mother’s death, as the family returned home from church, she overheard her father tell one of her older sisters that he hoped that, this year, he would no longer had to play that little, childish charade with Therese.

Overhearing this, Therese, a deeply sensitive child, was stung to the core, felt betrayed, and fell into a long period of silence and depression. Eventually she emerged from it and regained her resiliency and joy. Looking back on it years later, she saw her giving up of that particular hurt, and the hypersensitivity that provoked it, as one of the key moments of conversion in her whole life.

We usually wouldn’t define overcoming sensitivity as a religious conversion, but it is precisely that, a conversion with immense religious and emotional repercussions. Our happiness depends upon having the resiliency to accept the many hurts, disappointments, and injustices of life so as to live in the give- and-take that is required for family and community living. And we learn that lesson slowly.

The older I get, the more I am coming to know how sensitive people are and how easily they get hurt. It doesn’t take much for someone to ruin your day. We don’t just get hurt when we meet open hostility, insults, unfairness, or hatred. We can get deeply hurt just by overhearing a casual remark or simply by not being noticed, appreciated, or invited. The human heart is easily bruised, too easily.

And then, like Therese, the impulse is to withdraw, withhold, grow silent, nurse the wound, become depressed, grow cold. That is why we are often so cautious and paranoid inside of our families and communities. We don’t want to be cold, but we’re hurt.

Moreover that doesn’t bring out the best in us. Pettiness too often spawns pettiness. Thomas Aquinas once suggested that we have two souls inside us: an anima magna (a grand soul) and an anima pusilla (a petty soul). When we act out of our grand soul, we are generous, hospitable, big-hearted, and warm. Conversely, when we act out of our petty soul, we are paranoid, bitter, over-protective, cautious, and small-hearted. When we feel hurt it is all too easy to act out of the petty half of our souls.

We know the truth of that from everyday experience: One minute we can be feeling generous, hospitable, and big-hearted, and then an insult or a simple slight can trigger feelings of disappointment, bitterness, and pettiness. Which is really us? They both are! Everything depends, day to day, minute to minute, upon which soul we are drawing our vision and energy from at a given moment.

Of course we can always rationalize our bitterness, coldness, and pettiness by appealing to our sensitivity. We feel slights and insults deeply precisely because we are deep. There’s truth in that. The more sensitive we are, the more deeply we will feel both love and its betrayal. But, and this is the point, we need, like Therese, to see our hypersensitivity as something to be converted from so that we can be resilient enough to absorb the bumps and bruises of everyday living. Nobody can live for any length of time within a family or a community without hurting others and without getting hurt. The challenge is to have the resiliency to live with that.

Daniel Berrigan once commented that if Jesus came back today he would go into every counseling office in the world and drive out both the doctors and their clients with the words: “Take up your couch and walk! You don’t have to be this sensitive!”

Perhaps that’s strong, but it contains an important challenge to conversion. Henri Nouwen used to say that one of the key elements in spiritual conversion is to move from hostility to hospitality. All major spiritualities tell us the same thing.

In Tibetan Buddhism, the bowl is the image for resentment. In it is contained all our bitterness, disappointment, and disillusionment. We sit holding that bowl in our hands. We can either pour it forwards, so that the resentment flows away from us, or we can tip it onto ourselves, allowing all that poison to infect us. Our happiness depends upon which way we tip that bowl.

How can we let go of our hypersensitivity? A priest that I know once gave me this advice: Whenever you feel stung and hurt, pull away, sit in prayer, and stay there until the pain softens enough so that you can face others with warmth again.

Brilliant, Grumpy Old Men

March 19, 2007

Two of the better books I’ve read lately come from secular authors, James Hillman and Kurt Vonnegut. What these writers have in common, beyond common sense and great insight, is the fact that they’re both senior citizens, Elders, at that age where one is free enough to say what is needed without having to apologize.

Vonnegut’s book, A Man Without a Country, is a series of essays all loosely held together under the umbrella of the thoughts and feelings of an outsider, an exile, a man who can’t find a home even when he is supposedly at home. Here are a couple of examples:

On creativity: “The arts are not a way to make living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

Reading this, one is reminded of challenge that the poet, William Stafford, once threw out to an audience. He told them: “Get up each morning and write a poem before you do anything else!” “How can you do that?” someone asked, “you don’t always feel inspired!” “Lower your standards!” said Stafford. Creating anything, even if it isn’t up to professional standards or up to our own fantasies, makes the soul grow.

Vonnegut offers some insights too on marriage: What women and men are really looking for, he contends, is someone to talk to. But two people alone in a room or in a marriage don’t always add up to enough people, particularly if one is a woman and one is a man. More people need to be around, lots more. Big families, he says, have this figured out, and that is why marriage works best in extended families where there are more people to talk to. What really happens when a man and a woman are struggling in a marriage is this: No matter what their actual words, they are really saying to each other: “You are not enough people!” That’s the real inadequacy in most marriages.

James Hillman’s book is entitled, The Force of Character, and is on aging. He begins with a question: “Why? Why is it ordained, by nature and God, that just when we reach the age when our mental capacities are at their greatest that our bodies begin to fall apart and no amount of doctoring can keep us glued together?” His answer: The best wines need to be aged in cracked old barrels. So too the soul. It needs to be aged in a cracked old barrel. The physical infirmities and humiliations of old age are what mellow the soul.”

He then writes a series of chapters, each of which reflects on one of the physical challenges of aging, showing how that peculiar challenge is meant to shape and mellow the soul in a needed way. Here’s an example:

Why, he asks, does nature arrange it so that, at a certain age, you have to get up at night to go to the toilet? Why this indignity and cruelty?

Monks know the answer: They ring a bell at night and get up to pray a particular set of prayers called vigils. Vigils are properly done in darkness. Their mood and purpose are only served at night. Nature too knows this too and it turns us all into monks before we die. It makes us get up to attend to a humbling bodily imperative, but, once up, we don’t so quickly get back to sleep because Nyx, the goddess of night, pays us a visit and brings along her children – phantoms of fate, death, guilt, despair, blame, revenge, lust – and they keep us awake and force us to deal with them because we won’t deal with them during daylight. Awakening in the dark has always been seen spiritually as helping open one’s eyes to the other world and as a way of building character beyond selfishness. All religious traditions have the idea that night is the time we can gain the most insight from the other world. Monks have secrets worth knowing. They pre-empt nature and get up voluntarily at night to deal with these things. We don’t and so Nyx and her children, perhaps angry at us for avoiding them during the day, make their unwelcome appearance and force us to deal with them. When we can’t sleep at night, we are forced to recognize that our lives in the light have not been shadow-free.

Another nugget: Healthy sexuality, he says, “lies less in controlling lustful fantasies than in understanding their transpersonal nature as a cosmic dynamic.”

James Hillman and Kurt Vonnegut, a couple of grumpy, brilliant old men who do what Elders are supposed to do, dispense wisdom to the young!

Besotted by Celebrity

March 11, 2007

We are besotted by celebrity. For most of us, the rich and famous take on a god-like status and our own lives seem small, empty, and hardly worth living in comparison to what we imagine theirs to be.

Fame, we believe, gives someone a life bigger than our own. We live in just one place, anonymous, domestic, unknown, but someone who is famous, whose face is recognized everywhere and whose name is a household word, it would seem, is everywhere, omnipresent like God. No wonder we view them as gods and give them worship.

But there’s more: We also believe that fame gives immortality. Famous people may die, but they live on – Marilyn, Elvis, Diana, we don’t even need last names. Something about them stays, more than a gravestone. Fame leaves an indelible mark. Our fear is that our small lives won’t leave that. We disappear, the famous remain.

So it isn’t surprising that we are so besotted with the famous. They appear to us as gods – omnipresent and immortal.

But does fame really make one’s life larger? If someone’s face appears on billboards and magazine covers everywhere is he or she in some real way everywhere? Does a celebrity’s larger-than-life status indeed make their lives larger than ours? Does fame accord some kind of immortality?

At a superficial level, yes. To be a household name and to leave a legacy ingrained inside of peoples’ consciousness does, in a manner of speaking, make one omnipresent and does give one a certain kind of immortality.

But, being larger-than-life and having immortality, are very ambiguous concepts. There’s something very vaporous and unreal in the kind of omnipresence and immortality that fame brings. You can’t eat it and you aren’t present just because your name is. At the end of the day, fame doesn’t really enlarge you, nor give you the kind of immortality for which you really long. There’s enough loneliness, paranoia, fearfulness, breakdown, bitterness, drug abuse, and flat-out emptiness in the lives of celebrities to more than vouch for this. It’s no accident the three celebrities mentioned above – Marilyn, Elvis, and Diana – died as they did. Celebrity, of itself, doesn’t make one larger than life nor accord immortality.

What does enlarge our lives and give immortality? Compassion and contemplation.

Compassion: All the great religious traditions, from Hinduism to Christianity, teach that what makes our lives small is not place, anonymity, and occupation, but selfishness, self-preoccupation, ego, and narcissism. My life is small and petty precisely when it’s centered upon myself. However, when I can, through empathy, break a little the casings of my own selfishness and connect myself to the feelings and thoughts of others, by that very connection, my life becomes larger.

I know a hermit who has lived by himself for more than 35 years. He lives alone and his existence is known to few people. Yet, paradoxically, his life is really larger-than-life. He’s the most connected man I know. When he prays at night, alone, by his own description, he “feels the very heartbeat of the planet, and feels the joys and sufferings of everyone.”

That’s the very opposite of an experience we so commonly have when, inside the very buzz of social life, we feel nothing but our own obsessive restlessness and the smallness of our lives.

Contemplation works in the same paradoxical way: We connect ourselves most deeply to the world and we taste immortality when we are in solitude, in contemplation. What is that?

Contemplation is not a state of mind where we don’t think of anything, a blankness beyond distraction. Nor is it necessarily thinking lofty, sublime, or holy thoughts. Contemplation is, as Thomas Merton so aptly defined it, a state within which we are present to what is actually going on in our lives, and to the timeless, eternal dimensions inside of that. We are in solitude and contemplation when we are really aware that we are drinking water when we are drinking water.

Here’s how he, Merton, describes a graced moment of contemplation:

“[Today] it is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with one’s hunger and one’s sleep, one’s cold and warmth, rising and going to bed. Putting on blankets and taking them off, making coffee and then drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditating, working, praying. I live as my ancestors have lived on this earth, until eventually I die. Amen. There is no need to make an assertion of my life, especially about it as mine, though doubtless it is not somebody else’s. I must learn to gradually forget program and artifice.”

We are so besotted by celebrities because we are always looking outside of ourselves to find what is timeless, what can enlarge us, and give us immortality. But what we are looking for is already inside of us, something we must awaken ourselves to, namely, our union through compassion with everything that is and our tasting of what’s immortal and eternal through being aware of the cold and the warmth inside of our own lives.

Praying When We Don’t Feel Like It

March 4, 2007

Most of us find it difficult to pray. We want to pray, make resolutions to pray, but never quite get around to actually praying. Why?

It’s not so much that we are insincere, ill-motivated, or lazy, it’s just that invariably we are too tired, too distracted, too restless, too emotionally preoccupied, too angry, too busy, or feel ourselves too distant from God to feel that we can actually pray. We have too many headaches and too many heartaches. And so we come home after a long day and simply can’t work up the energy to pray and instead call a friend, watch television, rest, putter round the house, or do anything to soothe our tiredness and wind down from the pressures of life, except pray.

How can we pray when both our bodies and our hearts are chronically stressed and on over-load?

By understanding what prayer really is. Prayer, as one of its oldest definitions puts it, is “lifting mind and heart to God.” That sounds simple but it is hard to do. Why?

Because we have the wrong notion of what that means. We unconsciously nurse the idea that we can only pray when we are not distracted, not bored, not angry, not emotionally and sexually preoccupied, and not caught up in our many heartaches and headaches so that we can give proper attention to God in a reverent and loving way. God then is like a parent who only wants to see us on our best behavior and we only go into his presence when we have nothing to hide, are joy-filled, and can give him praise and honor. Because we don’t understand what prayer is, we treat God as an authority figure or a visiting dignitary, namely, as someone to whom we don’t tell the real truth. We don’t tell him what is really going on in our lives but what should, ideally, be going on in them. We tell God what we think he wants to hear.

Because of this we find it difficult to pray with any regularity. What happens is this: We go to pray, privately or in church, and we enter into that feeling tired, bored, preoccupied, perhaps even angry at someone. We come to prayer carrying heartaches and headaches of all kinds and we try to bracket what we are actually feeling and instead crank up praise, reverence, and gratitude to God. Of course it doesn’t work! Our hearts and heads (because they are preoccupied with something else, our real issues) grow distracted and we get the sense that what we are doing – trying to pray – is not something we can do right now and we leave it for some other time.

But the problem is not that our prayer is unreal or that the moment isn’t right. The problem is that we are not “lifting mind and heart to God.” We are trying to lift thoughts and feelings to God which are not our own. We aren’t praying out of our own hearts and own heads.

If we take seriously that prayer is “lifting mind and heart to God” then every feeling and every thought we have is a valid and apt entry into prayer, no matter how irreverent, unholy, selfish, sexual, or angry that thought or feeling might seem. Simply put, if you go to pray and you are feeling bored, pray boredom; if you are feeling angry, pray anger; if you are sexually preoccupied, pray that preoccupation; if you are feeling murderous, pray murder; and if you are feeling full of fervor and want to praise and thank God, pray fervor. Every thought or feeling is a valid entry into prayer. What’s important is that we pray what’s inside of us and not what we think God would like to see inside of us.

That’s why the Psalms are so apt for prayer and why the Church has chosen them as the basis for so much of its liturgical prayer. They run the whole gamut of feeling, from praising God with our every breath to wishing to bash our enemies’ heads against a stone. From praise to murder – with everything in between! That is indeed the range of our thoughts and feelings. The Psalms are a keyboard upon which we can play every song of our lives – and our songs aren’t always all happy or pious. The Psalms give us an apt language to help us raise mind and heart to God.

What’s so unfortunate is that, most often, because we misunderstand prayer, we stay away from it just when we most need it. We only try to pray when we feel good, centered, reverent, and worthy of praying. But we don’t try to pray precisely when we most need it, that is, when we are feeling bad, irreverent, sinful, emotionally and sexually preoccupied, and unworthy of praying.

But all of these feelings can be our entry into prayer. No matter the headache or the heartache, we only need to lift it up to God.

The World As a Phone Booth

February 25, 2007

For Christmas last year, I was given a cell-phone (a “mobile phone”, in European terms). I’d always resisted buying one for a couple of reasons.

First off, I’m already too accessible, as are most of us. The poet, Rumi, once said: “I have lived too long where I can be reached!” Wonderfully put. We can no longer go out for dinner, have a family outing, take a day off, or go on vacation without life intruding back in on us. The opportunity for instant and constant distance-communication has, no doubt, made our lives more efficient, but it has also made them more demanding and has robbed most of us of the precious few chances we still have to get away from the pressures of life. We are too accessible.

Beyond that, I have been perennially irritated by the over-use, mis-use, and useless-use of cell-phones. It is no longer possible to be in almost any public place and not be within earshot of someone talking on a cell-phone. I glance around public places sometimes – airports, parks, coffee bars, public squares, parks – and notice that virtually everyone is either speaking on one, punching information into one, or at least holding one in his or her hands. They’re omnipresent.

With that being said, I do admit that they are a marvelous invention and have saved lives. They’re also a wonderful convenience. In the two months that I’ve had mine, it has already twice bailed me out while driving and getting lost, allowed me to reschedule a flight while stranded in a storm, facilitated airport pick-ups on several occasions, and given me instant access from anywhere to colleagues, family, and friends.

But still, I’m hardly a convert. Cell-phones still too often irritate me. Why?

More superficially, I get the impression that too many of us still think that being engaged in a cell-phone conversation in a public place makes us look important. I may be wrong and, God-willing, the near universality of the phenomenon should soon enough erase any such illusions.

More seriously, I’m concerned about how cell-phones are changing the way we relate and deforming us somewhat both in our capacity for attention and in our propriety. Let me explain:

First, regarding our capacity for attention: I agree with Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat) when he suggests that mobile phones, text-messaging, emails, and other such media are making us so accessible to everybody that paradoxically we are becoming accessible to nobody. We are communicating all the time and, strangely, becoming lonelier in the process, more isolated from each other. Studies show that today, inside off of this instant and continuous communication, we in fact have fewer close friends and family life is being strained by technology, not enhanced by it. Technology is dividing us perhaps more than uniting us.

Beyond this, our excessive preoccupation with technological communication is producing in us something Friedman calls continuous partial attention disorder. We are becoming the antithesis of a contemplative. How do you stay in touch with your deep center when you are constantly pulled in all directions?

Recently in an airport, I sat beside a young man who was listening to an i-pod, working on his lap-top, and speaking on his cell-phone all at the same time. I suspect he would protest that he is now part of a generation that can “multi-task”. Perhaps there’s some worth in that since the capacity to walk and chew gum at the same time is indeed a virtue. But I would be wary of his contemplative capacities, just I would of his manners. Too often the capacity to “multi-task” is also the capacity to be impolite and inattentive to more than one person at the same time.

Then there is also what cell-phones are doing to us in terms of public propriety, etiquette, and manners.

In essence, we have turned the whole world into a phone-booth. But is that a bad thing? Efficiency-wise, no; but propriety-wise, yes.

Phone-booths were invented for a good reason, as were living rooms, offices, bedrooms, parks, living rooms, restaurants, dining rooms, theatres, and churches. We sit in public places today and we over-hear conversations that have to do with business, family life, intimacy, and trivia which propriety and manners suggest would be better conducted precisely inside of offices, living rooms, bedrooms, and parks – or at least in the relative privacy of a phone-booth. But the whole world is now becoming a phone-booth, just as it is also becoming a business office, a living room, a bedroom, and a venue for endless chatter in public about trivia that is best talked about in private. Cell-phones have not made for good hygiene, psychic or social.

In the end, cell-phones are a good thing. Sadly though our common sense and manners haven’t kept pace with the technology.

Moral Intelligence

February 18, 2007

There are different ways of being intelligent, of being awake. Not everyone is bright in the same way.

Some people are gifted mathematically and philosophically. That’s the intelligence of an Albert Einstein, an Alfred North Whitehead, a Bill Gates. Some others are gifted with emotional intelligence. You see this, for instance, in the great novelists, the Iris Murdochs, the Anne Byatts, the John Steinbecks, and the Alice Munroes, who possess an emotional grasp of things that the greatest psychologists in the world can only envy.

Then there is something that might be called practical intelligence. I saw this in some of my high school friends, young men who couldn’t pass enough courses to graduate, but who are wonderfully gifted with life-skills and are the ones the rest of us lean on whenever we need to sort out our plumbing, our automobile woes, our leaking roofs, and the thousand other things that mathematics, philosophy, and literature don’t equip us to handle.

There is too a certain aesthetic intelligence, that unique brightness of the artist which sometimes combines with the emotional or even the mathematical (especially in the case of music) but is often an intelligence all to itself.

Finally, there is still another kind of intelligence, moral intelligence. What is this? Sometimes we call it depth or wisdom or character. Whatever its name, moral intelligence is a sensitivity to the deeper contours within life. It is a certain grasp of those things which hold life together at its root and which must be respected so that life doesn’t go sour, unravel, disintegrate, and turn against us. Moral intelligence intuits the imperatives innate within the DNA of life itself. It grasps the things we have do, and not just the things we like to do. It lays bare the hard-wiring inside the mystery of life and love.

Where does it come from? Like other forms of intelligence, it is perhaps mainly a natural endowment, a temperament, a grace given by God as a gift to the world. But, I suspect, in most cases it is also the product of something else, namely, a certain kind of suffering and humiliation. What do I mean by that?

If we look at our lives and ask ourselves: What has made us deep? What has helped us to understand the deeper things in life? If we are honest, we will have to admit that what made us deep were not our successes or achievements. These brought us glory, but not depth or character.

What brought us depth and character are the very things we are often ashamed to talk about, namely, our inferiorities – getting picked last on the school team, being bullied on the playground, some physical inadequacy, our mother’s weight problem, our dad’s alcoholism, an abuse inflicted upon us that we were powerless to stop, a slow-wittedness that perpetually left us out of the inner circle, our failure to achieve what we’d like to in life, a pain about our sexual orientation, an addiction we can’t master, and many, many other small and big wounds and bruises that helped shape our souls.

James Hillman, our generation’s maverick intellectual, speaks eloquently on this. Depth, he suggests, never comes out of our successes, but only out of our inferiorities and failures. And this, he says, gives us character: Our scars are like huge stones in a riverbed; they may do nothing but stay still and hold their ground, but the river has to take them into account and alter its flow because of them and it’s precisely this which gives a river (and a face) some character.

This truth lies at the very heart of Jesus’ life and message. When the disciples can’t fathom or accept the crucifixion, he asks them: “Wasn’t it necessary?” Isn’t there a necessary connection between the humiliation of Good Friday and the glory of Easter Sunday? Isn’t there an intrinsic connection between going through a certain kind of suffering and reaching a certain kind of depth?

Indeed, Jesus’ struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane, his asking God three times to spare him from the pain and humiliation of being crucified, was precisely his own reluctance to accept that a certain kind of depth can only be arrived at by journeying through a certain kind of humiliation. And, in his case, he wasn’t just going to be picked on by the playground bully, he was going to be hung naked before the whole world. But that was the only route to Easter Sunday and he had the moral intelligence to see it.

And what the crucifixion produced is moral wisdom. That’s why the cross of Christ, as Rene Girard puts it, is the single most revolutionary moral event that has ever happened on this planet. What the cross of Christ does, as the gospels tell us, is rip away the veil the separates us from seeing inside the holy of holies.

And our own crosses and humiliations can do that for us too. They can rip away a blindness and wake us up morally.

The Therapy of a Public Life

February 11, 2007

Thirty years ago, Philip Rieff wrote a book entitled, The Triumph of the Therapeutic. In essence, he argued that today, in the Western world, so many people need psychological therapy mainly because our family structure has grown weak and many community structures have broken down. In societies where there are still strong families and strong communities, he contends, there is little need for private therapy; people can more easily work out their problems inside of family and community. Conversely, where family and community are weak, we are very much left on our own to deal with our own problems, and a therapist, rather than a family, has to help us.

If Rieff is right, and I suspect he is, then it follows that the answers to many of the issues that drive us to the counseling couch lie as much, and perhaps more, in a fuller and healthier participation within public life, including church life, than in private therapy. We need, as Parker Palmer brilliantly suggests, the therapy of a public life.

What is meant by this? How does public life heal and strengthen us?

In brief, public life (life within family and community, beyond our private selves and beyond our private intimacies) is therapeutic because it draws us beyond ourselves into the lives of others, gives us a certain rhythm, and connects us with resources beyond the poverty of our own limitations.

To participate healthily in other people’s lives takes us beyond our own obsessions. It also steadies us. Most public life has a certain rhythm and regularity to it that helps calm the chaotic whirl of our private lives, which are often racked with disorientation, depression, restlessness, and an almost infinite variety of obsessions. Participation in public life gives us clearly defined things to do, regular stopping places, regular events of structure and steadiness, a rhythm — commodities no psychiatric couch can provide. Public life links us to resources beyond ourselves.

Let me try to illustrate this with an example. While doing studies in Belgium, I was privileged to attend the lectures of Antoine Vergote, a renowned doctor of both psychology and the soul. I asked him one day how one should handle paralyzing emotional obsessions, both within oneself and when trying to help others.

His answer surprised me. In essence, he said this: “The temptation you might have, as a priest, is to too simplistically follow the religious edict: ‘Take your troubles to the chapel! Pray it all through. God will help you.’ It’s not that this is wrong. God and prayer can and do help. But obsessional problems are mainly problems of over-concentration, and over-concentration is broken largely by getting outside of yourself, outside of your own mind, heart, life — and room! And so my advice is: Get involved in public things, from entertainment, to politics, to work. Get outside of your closed world. Enter more into public life!”

He went on, of course, to qualify this so that it differs considerably from any simplistic temptation to simply bury oneself in distractions and work. His advice here is not that one should run away from doing painful inner work, but that solving one’s inner private problems is dependent upon outside relationships, both of intimacy and of a more public nature.

In support of this, I offer another example. For more than a dozen years I taught theology at a theological college. Many is the emotionally unstable student, fraught with every kind of inner pain and unsteadiness, who would show up at our college and slowly get emotionally steadier and stronger, and that strength and steadiness came not so much from the theology courses, but from the rhythm and health of the community life. These students got well not so much from what they learned in the classrooms as they did by participating in the life outside of them. The therapy of a public life is what helped heal them.

And for us as Christians, the therapy of public life also means the therapy of church life. We become emotionally better, steadier, less obsessed, less a slave to our own restlessness, and more able to become what we want to be by participating fully and healthily within the public life of the church. Monks, with their monastic rhythm, have long understood this and have a secret worth knowing, namely, a regular program, a daily rhythm, participation in community, the demand that we show up, and the discipline of the monastic bell that calls us to activities, not when we want them but when they are set for us, have kept many a man and woman sane, and relatively happy besides.

Regular Eucharist, regular prayer with others, regular meetings with others, regular duties, and regular responsibilities within ministry not only nurture our spiritual lives; they keep us sane and steady. Private therapy can sometimes be helpful in supplementing this, but public, ecclesial life, with its peculiar rhythms and demands, is what, first of all and most of all, keeps us steady on our feet.

The Ninety-Nine and the One

February 4, 2007

Throughout the years that I’ve been writing, I’ve received lots of criticism. Sometimes it’s bitter and mean-spirited and I tend, then, not to respond to it, believing that things are furthered by familial conversation, not by a fist fight.

Sometimes, though, the criticism is sincere, thoughtful, and genuinely challenging. One such critique has to do with my approach in general: “Why,” people sometimes ask me, “do you write the way you do, invariably with some kind of secular bent? Why don’t you focus more on catechesis, on teaching church doctrine, on explaining the creeds, on defending the church’s position on moral issues such as abortion, and on doing apologetics for the church?”

Fair enough. The Christian community needs these things, particularly today when many Christians, including regular churchgoers, lack clarity about what they are supposed to believe and lack the tools they need to explain and defend their beliefs in the face of an ever-growing number of critics.

So why do I write the way I do? Why, as my critics put it, “the invariable bent toward the secular”?

My answer: Because I am trying to be a missionary and missionaries have been asked, by Jesus himself, to leave the ninety-nine and go after the one.

Allow me an image:
Midway through his pontificate, John Paul II instituted World Youth Day. When he first proposed this concept, his advisors were pretty skeptical: “Young people aren’t going to come out to see an old man,” they said. But his critics were wrong, and in a huge, huge way. His meetings with youth brought together some of the largest crowds ever assembled. Millions of youth gathered to pray with him.

I was living in Toronto when World Youth Day was held there in 2002 and I joined with the nearly one million young people from around the world who gathered to meet with John Paul II. And it was a wonderful, graced event.

But, while nearly a million young people came out for that event, 50 million young people didn’t — and not just because they didn’t have the practical or financial means to go to Toronto. For every young person who was excited about that event, there were probably 50 who were indifferent to it or, worse still, turned off by it.

That’s not a commentary on John Paul II, this event, or the church, but a commentary on the lived reality and attitude of the majority of persons, including the majority of baptized Christians today, at least inside of our highly secularized culture. Those people who were indifferent to, or turned off by, World Youth Day, are the “strays” that Jesus told us to search for lovingly in the desert, even if it means not being able to focus as much as we’d like on the ninety-nine who are being faithful.

Please don’t misunderstand this: Those who are faithful and practice regularly, the million who show up for World Youth Day, need to be nurtured and fed — with doctrine, catechesis, clear moral teaching, and the apologetic tools they need to explain their faith to their over-zealous critics.

But Jesus’ mandate is still there: Leave the ninety-nine who haven’t strayed and go after the one who has strayed. Today, however, the default seems to have shifted and it’s perhaps more a case of leaving the one and going after the ninety-nine.

And this requires that our teaching and preaching, and our reaching out to the world in general, must contain more than only catechesis, explanations of our creeds, clarity around dogma and morals, and even the repetition (however valid, needed, and timeless) of the language of Scripture and the creeds. Those things need to be done, but that is only part of the task. The other part, equally needed and perhaps more difficult, is the task of relating these things (Scripture, the creeds, our dogmas, our moral teaching) to the energy, the color, the endeavors, the longings, the health, the sickness, the virtues, the sin, the beauty, and the pathos of our world.

More and more people feel themselves thoroughly disconnected from our church circles and our church language, and the fault isn’t all on their side. We need missionaries to the world, people like Henri Nouwen, who can stand solidly within the church and invite the world, with all its desires and grandiosity, to join us, not as adversary but as family.

And the language we need to do this isn’t simply out there, in our catechisms and dogmas, to be picked up and deployed. Much of the language we need has to be created anew by our own generation which, like every generation, needs itself to eat God’s word, digest it, and then enflesh it so that God’s written word becomes a living word, inside our own flesh.

I don’t claim to have accomplished this, nor to be anybody’s expert, but I do know that Christ’s mandate is to reach out to the world and not just to those who are coming to our churches.